Nine of the expelled musicians were lucky enough to escape. Only two ever returned to Austria, and none to the Vienna Philharmonic.
There was nothing gold in the Teatro Municipal. Nothing gilded, nothing of lofty Viennese elegance. Except for my father, who looked uncommonly elegant in a black suit a Bolivian tailor had sewn for him. My mother had trimmed his greying hair, so it no longer drifted wildly around his head, dry and staticky. He was smiling as he took his seat and picked up his viola, tucked it against him. The drone of tuning instruments swelled to fill the small room.
The theater had only a few hundred seats and acoustics that would challenge a world-class orchestra. As my mother and I took seats in one of the middle rows, I wondered if she was also thinking of the last time we had seen my father perform. The height of that ceiling, the vibration of the wood. It must have been just before the Anschluss, when the men who sat beside my father, who lifted their bows with his, who tuned their strings to his, who had played Mahler without protest, were longing for his death. For the first time, I wondered what it had been like for my father to show up at work every day knowing that so many of the men around him were Nazis. Every time he walked through the door he took a seat among men whose vision of the future included his destruction. But my father believed in music; I wonder if he had been waiting for Mahler to convince them.
Every few minutes we stood up to say hello to a friend or to allow someone into our row. There were very few strangers. But Thekla had stayed at home. I waved to Miguel, who arrived with his mother and his sisters Celia, Ema, and Nina. I had hardly seen him lately, busy with work, looking after my aunt, and meeting Nayra in the market. But the sight of his face was like a glimpse of home. I had invited Nayra, but she had said she wouldn’t be in La Paz. Perhaps she worried she wouldn’t feel welcome in the crowd of white faces. Or perhaps she had to work. Maybe both.
This ramshackle orchestra had drawn itself together as news of my father’s former colleagues finally reached us. The handful of musicians who had escaped to Canada and the United States wrote to my father about the others. The Vienna Philharmonic had always prided itself on its strict standards. One must not be late for rehearsal. One must play in the tuning pitch of A=443 Hz. One must use vibrato only sparingly. One must not be female. One must not have dark skin.
It was never against the rules, however, to join the Nazi Party. It was never against the rules to send the musicians who had played beside you for decades to their deaths. Even now, even after the war, Nazis remained in the Vienna Philharmonic, which seemed to suffer very few pangs of conscience. The end of war had apparently not meant the end of the hatred that had caused it.
* * *
• • •
I TOOK MY MOTHER’S HAND, thin and cold, and looked up at the ceiling. There was no chandelier. I wondered if the building could even support the weight of a chandelier; the weathered ceiling looked too derelict to withstand the vibration of the music. The walls were too hard. Music could not sound right here. It would rebound upon itself, find our ears too soon or too late. Anxiety hummed in my sternum.
Conductor Erich Eisner lifted his baton. The circle of musicians who once gathered in our rooms had grown, eventually including Eisner, a Czech pianist who had escaped from Dachau before the war. He had apprenticed under Bruno Walter, which immediately gave him and my father common ground. It was Eisner who had led this group of men, nearly all Jews from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Germany, to form this orchestra. These men had all once been paid a salary for their work, which they now gave away for free.
Their gazes met at Eisner’s baton before dropping to their individual music stands. They began.
* * *
• • •
AFTERWARD, MY FATHER seemed unable to get up from his chair. As the other musicians rose to file out, he struggled to get to his feet, pale and sweating. As Gregor passed close to him, he paused, gently lifting my father with an arm around his ribs. Without glancing out at us, they continued slowly through the door in the side of the room.
“Is Vati all right?” My father had never been ill, never suffered from the altitude. My stomach burned with fear. I reached for my mother, who was standing already, her right hand pinching the skin at her sternum.
“Let’s go see him, shall we?”
But when we got to the door, the woman guarding the back rooms where the men had prepared for their performance told us we would need to wait in the foyer. Mathilde waved from across the room and we joined her and Fredi outside. “It’s good to see Jakob in action,” she said to my mother.
“He is always in action,” I replied distractedly. “He never stops.” My father’s absorption in his music was so consistent there were moments I wondered if our change in circumstances had even touched him.
“Well,” she said, with a short laugh. “I just meant onstage.”
“Of course.” My mother patted Mathilde as if she could brush off my rudeness. “How are you, Tildy?” Her Spanish not fluent enough to allow her to continue her career as a journalist, Mathilde had opened a dress shop, making clothing to order from American patterns she imported. Fredi had risen to the position of supervisor in one of the textile factories. They had been trying to have a child since they moved to La Paz, but Mathilde had suffered seven miscarriages, the last one at six months. “I can’t try anymore,” I had heard her tell my mother over tea when they didn’t think I was listening. “I cannot take one more loss.”
“We’re doing well, Julia. We’re still here, aren’t we?” She smiled. “And we got to hear Jakob.”
Other refugees came to congratulate us. None of us pretended it was the best concert we had ever attended. None of us declared the performance the definitive interpretation of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony or Beethoven’s Third. Instead we talked about it as a “significant start” or a “wonderful effort.” I looked for Miguel in the crowd, wanting to hear what he thought. But he and his family had vanished.
“Orly!” Sarah pounced on me, both hands around my arm. “Your Vati is wonderful.”
“Isn’t he?” I allowed her to embrace me, but I was having trouble focusing. Where was my father? Seven years earlier, he would have sprung from the back rooms to be with us by now, high on adrenaline, steering us all toward a café. “Nothing replenishes the soul after a performance like Palatschinken,” he would say, taking my hand. He liked the thin pancakes rolled with apricot jam, especially as a reward for performing.
“Are you missing your golden ladies?” His voice arrived, warm and low in my ear.
“Vati!” I threw my arms around him. His shirt was damp with sweat, nearly transparent. “Vati, you’ll get cold.”
His face was still pale, but his hands trembled only slightly. “Is that all you have to say to your father, who has provided such a marvelous sound track to your afternoon?”
“Oh, Vati, you know you were brilliant.”
“I must confess, performing up here in the sky is harder than I had imagined.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his neck.
My mother abandoned Mathilde to take his arm. “You’re all right?”
“It has been a little while since I had such a workout in front of an audience. Every time I think I might have adjusted to the altitude, something reminds me of the lowlands from which I come.”
“I’m not sure the Alps can be considered lowlands.”
“Ah, my charming wife, but it is your side of the family who come from the Styrian mountains. My relatives have always been city folk.” He paused, perhaps reflecting that he no longer had relatives from anywhere, as far as he was aware. “Well. What do you think, Julia, are pancakes even a possibility?”
Fifty-two
The room was small with a curved ceiling, cavelike, all the illumination provided by candles on the wooden tables. My father touched my elbow. “See, Orlita, birthday candles! They
knew you were coming.”
I hadn’t had birthday candles since we moved to La Paz. When I was small, my mother would light the candles on a wooden wreath that sat on our kitchen table before I was awake. The tiny flames would burn all day. But since we moved to Bolivia, birthdays had been only minimally acknowledged, with a viola serenade and a kiss on the cheek. Festivity hadn’t felt appropriate during the war, although we continued to celebrate Passover and Chanukah every year with Mathilde and Fredi and the Grubers.
Today, I was eighteen.
I hadn’t expected much from the day other than one of my mother’s Sacher tortes, which I had requested. But after dinner, my father had told me to change into my best dress and put on my shoes. “You too, Julia.” My mother and I, exchanging arched eyebrows, obeyed. Aunt Thekla did not emerge from her room.
The three of us walked up to the café on calle Jaén, my father swinging his viola case and carrying a lumpy bundle wrapped in a pillowcase. I was mystified.
Now the three of us sat in the dancing light, waiting. Several of the other tables were occupied, mostly by Bolivians. My father ordered three singanis.
“Wait—make that four.” He had just spotted Vico weaving through the tables toward us, carrying his charango case.
I stood to kiss his cheek. “What are you doing here?”
“A better question would be, what will you be doing here?”
I glanced at my father, puzzled, but he only smiled and lifted his palms.
Vico walked over to the low stage, where he stood chatting with one of the waiters. After a few minutes, he was joined by another man, carrying a guitar case.
I sipped my singani, sweet and smooth. I looked around at the walls, painted with murals of mountains and brightly colored houses. My mother shifted uncomfortably in her chair. She was usually asleep by now. It had been months since my father and I had listened to live music together; my mother had never before come to a Bolivian café to hear music with us.
Vico eased his charango from its case and cradled it in his arms as his friend tuned his guitar strings. Vico looked over at us. “Ready, Jakob?”
My father stood and picked up his viola case. My father played with Vico? I hadn’t even known there was music for both viola and charango. And guitar, apparently.
The men continued to tune their instruments as several more people found seats. Mathilde and Fredi came over to kiss us, then the Grubers and my deskmate Sarah.
“¡Feliz cumpleaños!” The voice came from behind my left shoulder. I twisted in my seat. “Miguel!”
“Kantutita. Felicidades.” He bent to kiss my cheek, smelling of an unfamiliar aftershave, and pulled a chair over to our table.
“Gracias.”
“Did my father invite you all here?”
“I’ve been sworn to secrecy.” He grinned at me, his teeth white in the dim light.
My father’s bow drew across the strings. They began with “Rosita de Pica,” Vico’s fingers a blur on his strings before launching into Telemann’s Viola Concerto in G Major, which I had never imagined could incorporate a charango. My feet stirred under my chair and Miguel’s fingers tapped the side of his leg nearest me.
After their third song, my father stood up. “Thank you all for coming,” he began in his formal-sounding Spanish. “I’ve been performing my whole life, but this is my first time performing with these particular instruments—” He gestured to the guitar and charango. “And with these particular musicians! So I thank you for your tolerance.
“And I beg of you one more favor. My daughter, Orly, some of you may know her—” Miguel elbowed me in the ribs and I heard Sarah’s laugh. “It’s her eighteenth birthday tonight. She has been studying charango for a while now, and I thought she might like the chance to play with some fellow musicians. And her papá.” He held out his hand to me as Vico began plucking out the chords to “Cumpleaños Felices” on his charango.
My face flushed in the dark. As Vico began to sing “Happy Birthday,” my father retrieved the bulky pillowcase from underneath his chair and pulled out a familiar instrument. “You may want this.”
I took the charango from him and stumbled to the stage. I shouldn’t have had that singani. Vico strummed a final chord and stood up, offering me his chair. I sank down and turned my attention to tuning my strings. “Just pretend it’s a lesson,” Vico whispered. “It’s all practicing.”
My father looked at me. “What shall we play?”
Vico spoke first. “Dos Palomitos?”
I shook my head. The fingerwork was very fast.
“Let’s do La Cocinerita.” The Argentinian folk song about a cook wasn’t my favorite tune, but it was simple.
I looked out at my friends, only barely visible in the hazy light of the café. “This is for my mother, who is herself a cocinerita.”
Fifty-three
In early 1946, several months after my aunt arrived, something happened that changed everything for all of us. It was a late afternoon, near 5:00 P.M. My aunt and I sat on a wooden bench just inside my mother’s tiny storefront adjacent to the Riesenrad Café. Children raced around in the park outside, chasing pigeons. We had bought a few vegetables at the market to take home for dinner and stopped to share one of my mother’s poppy-seed rolls.
Now that Thekla had begun to notice her surroundings, now that she was willing to eat a bit of marraqueta with her tea, she didn’t need constant supervision. When I wasn’t practicing charango or shelving books, I walked Thekla to the plaza and through the open door of the café. Today, we watched people approach my mother at the counter and ask her questions about her food. I was proud that she was able to manage on her own, speaking Spanish. I didn’t help her anymore. I sat in the corner, letting her struggle.
So I wasn’t looking at my aunt when I saw our roll tumble to the floor and heard her strangled gasp. She was staring ahead of her at a man standing at the counter near the register, a tall, blond man cradling a bowl in one hand and shoveling large spoonfuls of soup into his mouth with the other. He looked uncommonly healthy, his complexion clear and his cheeks pink. Yet I would not have noted him were it not for his unusual height and for the fingernails suddenly deep in the flesh of my forearm. “That’s him,” she whispered. “Knochenmus.”
Knochenmus. I recognized the name. My aunt didn’t talk about her time at the camp but certain details leaked out of her in unguarded moments.
“From the camp?” I whispered, knowing the answer and yet unable to believe it.
She nodded faintly. I would have said she went pale, but it was not possible for her to grow any paler.
I could feel her body trembling against mine. I wrapped my arm around her waist and helped her up, my heart racing. I wanted to run to the man, to beat him senseless with my fists, to shove the rest of my roll down his throat. But even as these murderous thoughts flashed through my mind, I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t risk our safety. There might be more of them, more than we knew, more than we could count. They might be all around us.
“Come.” I didn’t want to leave my mother in her store, didn’t want to leave her near that man, but I had to get Thekla away. I heard the man laugh loudly and say something in German to his companion. The German speakers we knew were fellow refugees, but we had all heard rumors of Nazi spies in the Círculo Israelita and the reports that Nazis were arriving now on the same ships as the survivors of their plans. But we had never met one who had been there.
Half dragging my trembling aunt, I waved to catch my mother’s eye. Immediately, she knew something was wrong. Once she had rung up the last customers and ushered them to the street, she hurriedly locked the store and caught up with us as we pushed our way through the crowds toward home. “Thekla?” she said, touching her sister’s arm. When I explained who we had seen in her store, my mother’s face went still and hard. There was no surprise in her eyes. She turne
d and looked back toward the square, where the man now sprawled open-legged on a bench, pausing as if committing his features to memory. Stop looking at him, I wanted to say. Stop acknowledging his existence.
Seeing Knochenmus evaporated any progress my aunt had made toward wellness. She refused to dress or to leave the apartment. She wouldn’t eat unless my mother spooned something into her mouth. She could not stop trembling.
Fury took root in my belly. But it was nothing compared with the fury that took over my mother.
* * *
• • •
IT HADN’T OCCURRED to us that the Nazis would need to flee as we once had. It hadn’t occurred to us that they could choose the same route we had, to the same country.
They walked with their heads high—how could their heads still be high?—striding casually through our markets, our communities. Bolivia, our savior and protector, had let them in. If the Bolivians had allowed the Germans refuge, did that mean they would also allow them to exterminate us?
We could not dismiss this worry as mere paranoia.
* * *
• • •
THOSE OF US who had relaxed our defenses, who had finally accepted the relative peace of this place, drew up our drawbridges again. We huddled together, sharing information on these men, monitoring their movements. When my parents took me to a dance at the Austrian Club, I viewed everyone with suspicion. The small mustachioed man holding a pale beer at the bar—was he one? The fat man shoveling Schnitzel down his throat? Fatness in and of itself was suspect. We were mistrustful of the new Germans and Austrians, unless they had come from the camps. We doubted anyone whose face wasn’t haunted, who didn’t keep looking over his shoulder. Anyone who had survived intact.
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